Friday, March 5, 2021
- Highlighting Women's History Month -Katherine Johnson was born in 1918, in West Virginia. She first started attending high school at age 10, and by age 18, she had graduated from West Virginia State with highest honors. In 1939, she was chosen to be one of the first African American students to enroll in a graduate program for mathematics at West Virginia University. In 1953, Johnson began working at NACA’s West Area Computing unit: a group of African-American women whose computations were key components in the success of the early U.S. space program. Johnson was also a member of the Space Task Group at NASA. In 1960, she co-authored a paper with one of the group’s engineers- the first occasion that a woman in her division got credit for writing a research report. In 1961, she calculated the path for Freedom 7, the spacecraft that put the first U.S. astronaut in space, and was part of the rocket science team for the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, which sent the first three men to the Moon. For her work, she earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, a building in her name from NASA, and was written about in Hidden Figures by Margot Lee.
WRC Women’s History Month presented by Anna Lee
- Hey Writers! The Student-Written Play Festival deadline is coming up on March 14. We want you to write something. Details here: bit.ly/arhssw21
- The Minks (the ARHS Literary Magazine) is open and accepting all student work! Whether it’s an essay, poem, story, or any other piece of writing, email it to minks@arps.org, and your work could be included in this year’s edition!
